Choosing the Right Archiving Strategy

MailStore Server offers several options for archiving emails.

Tech Tip: Choosing the right archiving strategy

You can archive all incoming and outgoing emails automatically as well as archive emails from email server mailboxes and from email clients and files.

Choosing the right archiving strategy depends on the email infrastructure (e.g. email server and email clients) on one hand, and company objectives on the other.

Our Tech Tip video provides an overview.

Archiving All Incoming and Outgoing Emails Automatically

With this archiving method, all emails are archived before they are delivered to the user mailboxes.

Advantages

• Completeness of the archive
• Emails cannot be manipulated or deleted before archiving
• This helps to meet a growing number of compliance requirements

Disadvantages

• If private emails are allowed in the company, this archiving method may cause difficulties regarding the privacy laws of some countries. In this case, a company-wide ban of all private email communication, a contractual agreement with the employees or approval of an employee organization would be required
• The workload of the email server and the amount of data is not reduced because all emails are still delivered and stored in the mailboxes
• Emails can only be allocated to users as sent or received object; a reproduction of the mailbox folder structure is not possible

Implementation

• With Microsoft Exchange by archiving the Journal mailbox
• With IMAP-compatible email servers such as MDaemon, Kerio Connect or IceWarp Server by archiving multipdrop mailboxes (also called catchall mailboxes)
• In all other cases and in companies without their own email server by using the MailStore Gateway free of charge

Archiving of Individual Mailboxes

With this archiving method, emails are archived from the individual mailboxes of the users. This can be achieved by archiving the mailboxes directly from the email server or, if that is not possible, by archiving of email clients.

Advantages

• The folder structure of the archived mailboxes, email clients or PST files is applied to the archive facilitating access to the archived emails
• The archived emails can be deleted from the mailboxes according to pre-defined rules permanently reducing the workload of the email server

Disadvantages

• Emails can be deleted or manipulated before archiving, even if the archiving intervals are very short
• Meeting legal requirements cannot, or only with difficulty, be implemented

Time-controlled Execution of Archiving Tasks

Archiving of email servers is a continuously running task in MailStore Server, carried out server-side in the background, as soon as the execution of an archiving profile is set to Automatic. By defining a break between each execution as well as a period in which the archiving profile is never executed, administrators have full control over the automatic archiving process.

Archiving of email clients and email files usually depends on the current Windows user and is therefore executed on the client, typically manually (see One-time Archiving of Existing Emails). MailStore allows to create scheduled tasks in the Windows Task Scheduler to automate client-side archiving tasks. This should be considered if no other option is availble - server-side archiving is always to be preferred.

One-time Archiving of Existing Emails

In addition to archiving future emails, preexisting emails should also be archived and made available permanently to your company. This one-time process should include emails in decentralized storage (e.g. PST files or the users' email clients). At the same time, older emails (e.g. more than two years old) can be deleted from the mailboxes automatically after archiving. This frees up storage space on the email server and simplifies backup procedures. All emails remain accessible to users via the MailStore archive.